The cartoon takes the more benevolent look at how standards proliferate; the more cynical view is that individuals/corporations recognize that control or influence over an industry standard can give them significant power in the technology ecosystem. I think both the benevolent and the cynical view are always at play – but the result is the continual creation of “bigger and badder” standards which are meant to replace but oftentimes fail to completely supplant existing ones. Case in point, as someone who has spent a fair amount of time looking at technologies to enable greater intelligence/network connectivity in new types of devices (think TVs, smart meters, appliances, thermostats, etc.), I’m still puzzled as to why we have so many wireless communication standards and protocols for achieving it (Bluetooth, Zigbee, ZWave, WiFi, DASH7, 6LowPAN, etc)

Problem #2: standards aren’t purely technical undertakings – they’re heavily motivated by the preferences of the bodies and companies which participate in formulating them, and like the US’s “wonderful” legislative process, involves mashing together a large number of preferences, some of which might not necessarily be easily compatible with one another. This can turn quite political and generate standards/working papers which are too difficult to support well (i.e. like DLNA). Or, as Dilbert sums it up, these meetings are full of people who are instructed to do this:

Our one hope is that the industry has enough people/companires who are more vested in the future of the technology industry than taking unnecessarily cheap shots at one another… It’s a wonder we have functioning standards at all, isn’t it?